If Beeminder is anti-charity because it does not make sense to work towards a goal and success meaning that a charity does NOT get money, how about the opposite?
It would work like that: I can set a goal and if i achieve it, a pre-determined amount goes to charity. This could also be expanded with crowd-funding the goal and have people pitch in $5 each to my goal. If I make it, the pot goes to charity, I get to feel good about my accomplishment personally and for the charity, my friends gets to feel great for supporting me and a charity.
Interesting! First I should mention that that blog post is confusingly named (or confusingly URL’d). Beeminder is not anti-charity but rather anti-anticharity. We’re certainly pro-charity and even have an option to allocate half your pledges to charity as a perk of the Beemium plan.
I’m not sure yet what I think about having money go to a charity conditional on successful completion of a goal. One hesitation I have is that most goals are ongoing and open-ended – like exercising so many minutes per week – so there’s no end condition in those cases. But for other goals this could be cool. I like the idea of piloting ideas like this manually if anyone is inspired to set up something like this among friends and tell us how it goes. If that’s a success and more people are inspired to try it then we can think about whether it makes sense to be a feature in Beeminder proper.